Final 4 Detroit

$70 hotel rooms shot up to $200 per night this weekend. That's fine with me. I realize that this city will see more people the next three days than it has since the Super Bowl rolled through. And being from Chicago - a racket's a racket's a racket. You grab every prize you can when the circus comes to town.

But the temporary storefronts and the pop-up businesses amaze me. I really don't see how folks won't notice that behind the plywood cutouts, there's just a bunch of scaffolding. Folding tables selling souvenirs on the dirt floor of an empty commercial space; a temporary bar ("Detroit Sports Bar") that will be packed up next week; and a dozen or so commissioned installations in windows of vacant storefronts that have been quickly thrown up to give folks more to look at, more to buy, and more the feeling of a city in the hopes they will leave here with a positive image of the place. Don't get me wrong, I like these moves for the most part. Its cool to see what young talent comes up with when they're given free reign to design their own storefront. It was cool to be a part of two storefront installations myself. And as a side benefit it meant spending time down in the heart of it all- right along Woodward Ave by Campus Martius where the hub of the city's navigational spokes radiate from. It meant seeing friends pass by and striking up conversations in DOWNTOWN DETROIT. I've never known this to exist in the year that I've lived here. Granted, I'm not hard working enough to grind it out everyday at a downtown firm. If I did, I might see more of this. But I highly doubt that's the case. I worked at a corporate architecture firm in Chicago for a year right along Michigan Ave and I think ONE time I ran into a friend I knew. We talked for about 00:00:30 and then I had to split to get back to work. Most of the time I was just running around, too busy to look up, too stressed out to enjoy a single moment in the city with the friends I know that worked down there as well.

Now that there's a bit of a tangent, but I'll come back from it now and say that the experience of working on the fake storefronts showed me that the Downtown Detroit move has potential. Someone told me today that this city was meant to be a city of leisure. He's told me several different times on walks around Detroit to stop and pay attention to the general peace that sits in the Detroit air. I told him that 'cause there's nobody here, kinda joking. But maybe he's a bit right.

There's a lot of porch sitting in Detroit. There's a lot of sitting and having a time. There's a lot of conversations between strangers, a lot of positivity rolling around. I'm gonna do a post about my experiences jogging in Detroit soon - it's one of the most positive things I've seen.

I originally came to Detroit for a project and chose to stay here for the potential I've seen in this place. Its a city unlike any other I've seen in this country or anywhere. One part city of open spaces, one part city of unemployed leisure, one part corrupt city government, one part former industrial powerhouse, an equal part terribly wreched past. More than any other American city, Detroit can truly become anything it wants to be. A city of a million people living in a place that used to house two million. Its like Jared from Subway standing in his old pants.

Detroit is a city where proud individuals walk between abandoned buildings dressed in solid red, solid yellow or solid mint - head to toe. Hat, feather, suit, tie, shoes. The Monochrome has been coined the Detroiter. And it is always a hit - Always the proudest, Always the most dapper.

I like to think that one day the building owners of Downtown Detroit will get a break from the city to get a real shop owner in their space instead of a fake one. Pull a few good deals to get businesses in paying cheap rent and we have a city with amenities. People like cities with amenities. They don't like places where you have to go to the suburbs to grocery shop, to rent movies. We've got stimulus money being thrown around in discussions of demolition. "Removing blight" they say. Last I checked the single biggest blight in Detroit is the Motor City Casino. The second is a tie between the back of the Compuware building and all the horizontally-banded downtown parking structures it looks just like. Blight is not the Michigan Central Station. That's a historic landmark. Its like calling the Roman Coliseum blight.

I'm pulling for Villanova this Final Four. The finest underdog. Scottie Reynolds is the man and Jay Wright is a genius. I'm looking forward to seeing what this city is like with the rush of Final Four visitors to the sleepy downtown. And I hope, for this broken autistic city- this great city of alluring failure, that folks will leave here wide-eyed with possibility, storing happy memories in their vaults from the local favorite winning, or getting some good eats down at Slows. I realize the the first hope is unrealistic for most people. I've come to see that the potential my friends and I see in these buildings is not something that comes easy to most people. But the second hope is certainly more reasonable. There's a long way to go, a lot of ground to cover to get the intense images of the '67 riots and the depressing headlines of this past year crowded with memories of smiles and laughter. I'll take as a start the momentary feeling of safety and security or the glimpse of an interesting storefront display, even if it will come down next week. We gotta start somewhere.

Go Nova.